The Last of Us and the Case for "Greatest Game Ever"

An Analysis

By Louis Lalire

Part 1: The Game

I beat The Last of Us in four sittings across four days. The rest of my time during those four days, at work, mostly, I either spent recovering from what had just occurred within the games bleak, post-apocalyptic world, or spent pondering what would happen next to the game's two leads, Joel and Ellie. For those four days I, pardon the expression, lived and breathed The Last of Us. This game is the definition of "immersion", an oft-used word within video game criticism dictating an absorption to a game so deep that the player is psychologically unable to stop playing; or, to simplify colloquially, "So good you can't put the controller down." The Last of Us achieves its own unheralded level of immersion through a genuine dedication to character and world, and the binding of the two together.

This is the first game, in my personal experience, that has been able to so organically marry character and world in such a way that its varied, multi-dimensional characters are not overshadowed by the depth of their environment. In almost all games, even the best ones, the characters take a back seat to the world. Take Bethesda Games' excellent Fallout 3, for instance: the main character is interesting for the sole reason that we play as him (or her). They are merely the device through which we explore the world. Exploring miles of digital space is something that games have been able to capture for a decade, but exploring within the psyche of characters is something that games have been very uncomfortable with. Joel and Ellie do act as this same device through which the player can explore the world, but the more prominent means of exploration in  The Last of Us is that of Joel and Ellie themselves, as well as those they come across.

Playing as Joel, you are tasked by a militia group known as the Fireflies to transport a very important 14-year old girl, Ellie, across the post-apocalyptic United States. The cause of this societal destruction is kept intentionally vague, but it involved some sort of airborne virus, which has infected much of the population and turned them into some very disgusting and scary things. The surviving humans, meanwhile, are perhaps even more dangerous––they're cannibals and cutthroats that are willing to kill you for the clothes on your back. These are the two types of enemies that Joel and Ellie will encounter in their cross country journey, and they require quite different strategy and technique to overcome.

The fact that I have already talked so much about the world is an injustice to what is at the heart of the game: the relationship between two people. A girl and a man. A man, Joel, who's had everything taken away from him and keeps on surviving, for better or for worse, and a girl, Ellie, who was born in this world, wholly curious about how life was before all hell broke loose. It is extremely rare that a video game puts so much focus on an intimate relationship between two people, and as a result the game not only achieves a visceral immersion, but an emotional one.

There are many segments in the game in which Joel and Ellie are temporarily separated, and each time this happens I am overcome with fear. Playing as Joel, I feel a basic human need to protect Ellie because I care for her, not to complete an objective. This is the fundamental key to creating immersion: the player should be completing "objectives" or "missions" or what have you, without being conscience of it. They should not complete simply to complete, but to further their relationship with the main character, and the main character's relationships with the other characters in the world. It is this critics' belief that great games cannot simply be exceptional at the hands of just great gameplay or great story, nor should gameplay and story be in competition with one another, nor is one necessarily more important than the other. A great game is created when story and gameplay are intertwined so seamlessly that the player is unable to differentiate between the two. Story is dependent on gameplay, and gameplay is dependent on story.  If one completely outweighs the other, the player's immersion is subject to breaking.

Joel and Ellie's journey is consistently grim in tone, which may turn some players off, but its also consistently unpredictable, and I mean this, again, from both a gameplay and story perspective. While stealth is often the most effective means of moving forward, each scenario you find yourself in is different. One criticism I have of the game, which is also a flaw I found in the beloved Uncharted games, also by Naughty Dog, is that from time to time the segments feel very arena-like and enclosed. Its a gameplay flaw that is well masked, but I noticed, particularly in the Pittsburgh section, a choppiness in the action. Clear or sneak pass this "arena" of guys. Walk some. Then clear this "arena" of guys. Walk a little more and then clear this "arena" of guys. Despite this qualm, the gameplay as a whole remains dynamic. Right when you get used to fighting the infected, the game throws a bunch of human enemies at you. When you get used to being stealthy, the game will throw you into a full-fledged, Uncharted-like action set piece, whether its a panicked sprint away from a tank or a group of infected, a sniper section, or a boss battle. At this juncture, I find it necessary to point out the two most thrilling sequences in the game. The first involves Joel being separated from Ellie and getting stuck in a flooded hotel basement. This sequence was truly horrifying for me, and I escaped it by using all my ammo, bombs and molotov cocktails––down to my last arrow. The second was another sequence in which Joel and Ellie are separated, and the player must play as both of them as they try to locate each other in a thick blizzard, while also evading a group of cannibals.

The story matches the intensity of the action in and out of cutscenes. I will refrain from giving story details away, but I will say that Naughty Dog has created a narrative that is not afraid to stray away from the typical one-minded pace that linear stories provide. For years, linear story tellers, with very few exceptions (most of them coming out of Japan), have seemed to be of the mindset that the player will immediately lose interest if the pace is slowed down from breakneck speed. This thought process has been consistently undermining the developers' goals to create immersion. Developers think that if they keep throwing grandiose set pieces and large explosions at players, this will prevent them from "putting the controller down." But a turnstile of explosions every five minutes do not maintain the player's excitement. What keeps someone immersed is the ability to build tension and suspense in a way that makes each explosion that much bigger, and that much more memorable.

On much broader and significant terms, The Last of Us proves that video games have the potential to connect the player to characters just as profoundly as movies can connect the viewer and books the reader. It is preposterous that the debate of whether games are art or not is still relevant. Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann, Game Director and Creative Director, respectively, are artists, as are the rest of the team at Naughty Dog, and with The Last of Us they have created art. Those that still wish to try and deny that fact do so out of ignorance.




Part 2: The Greatest Game Ever

Video Games are by far the most difficult medium to attempt to derive a "greatest of" list from because they are constantly improving. Video game purists and old school gamers may want to scream at me for saying this, but it is difficult to deny. Technological advancements, unlike in music and film, have a direct correlation with product quality in the world of gaming. It is a worthless exercise to compare The Last of Us with Tetris (1984) or Super Mario World (1990) (or even, for that matter, to compare Super Mario World to Tetris).

Despite the technological advancements that have occurred in film, for example, sound, color, etc., they have little to no effect on our critical understanding of the medium. From a 2013 perspective, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, a silent film, can still create a deeper emotional response from its audience than J.J. Abram's Star Trek Into Darkness, a film in color, with sound, and, possibly, in IMAX (side note: I really do enjoy Into Darkness, by the way.). Just because Star Trek is ultimately more technically impressive by today's standards, that has little effect on the aspects of film that are timeless: story and character. In gaming, nothing is timeless. What makes a game special, the pillars that must combine to create an immersive experience: story, character, gameplay, and world, are all at least somewhat dependent on technology. For example, from a 2013 perspective, it is impossible to argue that Metal Gear Solid (1998) is a better game than The Last of Us. The world of The Last of Us is aesthetically pleasing, each house you enter is fully realized, and a college you visit and the city of Pittsburgh have a scope and size unseen in games not long ago. Technology creates this depth, it allows the world to be realized to this extent. The characters of The Last of Us, through impressive use of mo-cap, create facial expressions and body language that convey subtle emotions without even speaking. Technology creates this depth, it allows these characters to be realized to this extent. Video games are heavily dependent on a writers vision and an artists vision and a level designers vision and so on, but, alas, they are still very dependent on the technology itself, and what allows, far more than artists in film and music and literature. This is what creates such a conundrum when one tries to make a "greatest of" video games list. In 1998, Metal Gear Solid may have been one of the five greatest games in existence, but not today. By today's standards, it is still a good game, but its characters seem dull and emotionless, and its gameplay simple and its AI stupid.

By no means am I arguing that if a game is newer it is definitely better. I am arguing that technology has far more of an impact on video games than any other comparable medium, so, naturally, as technology improves, games, in general, will improve. And to flip this sentence onto itself, this also means that games do not last like movies and songs. Their dependence on current technology diminishes their value over time, and technology has improved so rapidly over video games' short lifespan, that it is pointless to argue, when nostalgia is removed from the equation, that the best game of twenty years ago, or ten years ago, can match up to the best game today. Spyro the Dragon is one of my five favorite games of all time, and I still play it at least once a year. But it has become one of my favorite games through my own personal experience with it. I grew up with it. If I were to look at it through an omnipresent eye, it would be silly to argue that its one of the five greatest games ever.

It is important to form a distinction between "greatest" and "most influential." How does one define "greatest"?  I believe it is some combination of immersion, influence, and innovation. There is no correct formula, for any medium that is, but out of these three criteria, "immersive" must be deemed the most important, because it is the most measurable. There is still very measurable value in originality and innovation within the video game world, but these things are much more difficult to quantify. One could convince me that Metal Gear Solid was more groundbreaking and influential for the stealth genre than The Last of Us is. However, you would be unable to convince me that this makes Metal Gear Solid better than the The Last of Us, a game insurmountably more complex and intricate in its gameplay, more sensitive and subtle in its depiction of character and world, and exponentially more immersive. It creates a more profound and emotionally involved experience for the player than any other game today, and more than any game in the past had the technology to do. This is my case for why The Last of Us is the greatest game of all time, and why, in 2017, it definitively won't be.

The Last of Us

Developed by Naughty Dog
Produced by Sony Computer Entertainment 
Rated M